the library

The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker, in which the author argues that human civilization is an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our own mortality.

"What man needs most is to feel secure in his self-esteem. But man is not just a blind gob of idling protoplasm, but a creature with a name who lives in a world of symbols and dreams and not merely matter. His sense of self-worth is constituted symbolically, his cherished narcissism feeds on symbols, on an abstract idea of his own worth, and idea composed of sounds, words, and images, in the air, in the mind, on paper. And this means that man's natural yearning for organismic activity, the pleasures of incorporation and expansion, can be fed limitlessly in the domain of symbols and so into immortality. The single organism can expand into dimensions of worlds and times without moving a physical limb; it can take eternity into itself even as it gaspingly dies."